Disclosed herein are methods for controlling printing using a printer driver interface, as well as corresponding apparatus and computer-readable medium.
Image forming devices such as printers, copiers and multi-function devices provide users the ability to print from a device such as a desktop or laptop computer, a handheld computer, or other electronic devices, to a printer connected to the device. The electronic devices may be stand alone devices, or may be connected in a network, such as in a business computing environment, which may include one or more printers.
In order for a printer to interface with and function with the computer to which it is connected, a printer driver can typically be installed on the computer. A printer driver is software which controls the printer from the computer. The printer driver may include a user interface which may be typically accessed by a user through an operating system or an application program, such as a word processing program, a spreadsheet program, or other types of programs, and viewed on a display.
When a user is getting ready to print a document, the document will usually have a page size, such as letter size, legal size, A4, envelope, and the like, that is typically set in the application that the document was created in. The user may decide to print the document with a different paper size. A user may also wish to make other changes to the document to be printed, such as scaling of the printed image, changing orientation of the printed image, and changing a position of the image on the page. It would be useful if the printer driver would help the user make these decisions and allow the user to see how the resulting printed document would appear. Current printer driver interfaces do not provide this functionality.